Black Alliance for Peace Calls on the U.S. to End Its War in Afghanistan

Black Alliance for Peace Calls on the U.S. to End Its War in Afghanistan

August 22, 2017—With the announcement that the Trump administration concluded its analysis of the war in Afghanistan, the administration had an opportunity to announce a sensible solution to the longest war in U.S. history by calling on all parties to the conflict to enter into serious discussions to create a process for national reconciliation and peace.

Instead, the administration committed the U.S. to an endless war in Afghanistan with no clear criterion for what the administration would define as a “win.” Moreover, by suggesting that the administration will curry favor with India—Pakistan’s bitter rival—in order for it to play a role in solving the conflict in Afghanistan amounts to a dangerous and cynical ploy that could inflame the already tense relations between the two nuclear-armed nations.

President Donald Trump’s call for support to increase military spending was a crude and opportunistic rationalization for endless war and the squandering of the nation’s precious resources, including the lives of its young.

The policies of this administration reflect the U.S. oligarchy’s continued commitment to use military force to advance its interests throughout the world. Members of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) understand that U.S. policymakers see the continued presence of the United States in Afghanistan as a strategy to counter the growing cooperation between China and the Russian Federation on the Chinese “silk road” project.

We also know that U.S. capitalists have their eyes on newly discovered and untapped mineral reserves of iron, cobalt, copper, gold, and lithium estimated at a value of over $1 trillion. This increases Afghanistan’s value for the U.S. corporate and financial sector, which has no problem sending young people off to die for its narrow interests.

With the bipartisan vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to increase the military budget by $75 billion—a figure that represents more than the entire military budget of the Russian Federation—it is no longer accurate to characterize this grotesque proposal as Trump’s idea.

The commitment to Full Spectrum Dominance has always had bipartisan support, but Democrats and their liberal allies have been able to present its militarism as somehow more benevolent than the Republicans’. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the world’s dominant global power, the commitment to maintain U.S. hegemony and its predatory form of capitalism known as neoliberalism has always been a bipartisan objective.

Before he even ran for president, Trump questioned the wisdom of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, seeing it as a lost cause that wasted resources and lives. Now as president, Trump has a different take. Joining the last two presidents before him, he adopted the agenda of military-industrial elites who see the necessity for a permanent U.S. presence in the country, resulting in the United States and its NATO partners establishing nine permanent military bases in the country.

The United States—as part of the U.S./EU/NATO axis domination—has been responsible for unspeakable acts of violence in every part of the world, with most of the victims of U.S. state violence being the non-European peoples of the world.

In an obscene testament to U.S. vanity and the psychopathological commitment to global white supremacy, billions of dollars have already been wasted, almost three thousand U.S. lives lost and over 100,000 non-U.S. lives have been taken.

It is time to admit defeat in Afghanistan and bring the war to an end. Justice and common sense demands that the bloodletting stop.